Words&Dirt

“Maybe the world was like a revolving door, it occurred to him as his consciousness was fading away. And which section you ended up in was just a matter of where your foot happened to fall. There were tigers in one section, but no tigers in another. Maybe it was as simple as that. And there was no logical continuity from one section to another. And it was precisely because of this lack of logical continuity that choices really didn’t mean very much.”

––The Wind-Up Bird Chronicle, by Haruki Murakami, pg. 411

“For me, the essence of freedom is that my actions are caused, at least in part, by my beliefs, my values, my memories, my choices, my aspirations. When I act (or refrain from acting) because of outside coercion, I am not free. When my choices and actions are constrained in ways inimical to my core values because of the larger social structure I live in, I am not free. If I am afflicted by a disease like Alzheimer’s that robs me of my memory and my ability to acquire new data and reason about my beliefs, I am not free. I am most free when my behavior originates in those propositions I consider to be true about the world, and those values and aspirations that I have selected to guide my journey through the flux of events. I readily admit, of course, that much of my behavior is not free. I am subject to all of the negative qualifiers above and more (except, so far as I know, neurological disease)––this is simply part of the human condition. Importantly, however, ‘free’ and ‘unfree’ are not either/or conditions; most of the time our choices and actions lie somewhere along a continuum between these poles, influenced to some extent by both. I consider personal growth and maturity to be a lifelong effort to move from the ‘unfree’ side of that continuum toward the ‘free.’”

–– “Neuroscience, Explanation, and the Problem of Free Will,” by William T. Newsome, Moral Psychology, Vol. 4, ed. Walter Sinnott-Armstrong, pg. 85